Marriage Plot
The end of a type of life. Everyone getting married.
Cheap flight to one much loved city then the next. Bag a web of hairstyling cords, patent technology. Mass-produced breakfast while sleep beckons. Plastic smush of the tray table. One thousand undulating dresses: gossamer, polyester, toile.
Is this real life or far from it? Dancing with you slightly stupefied, cake-faced, all powerful, enjoying the wealth of a more calloused generation. Short rib and lemon icing and tangerine crush of pill discovered in the folds of someone’s handbag. Ambiguous thrill of being the hot friend in a crowd of cousins. We couldn’t have done it without you. Love is this, but also that.
Tomorrow the staff will bleach the napkins of our sauce and spit. Toothless bartender. A lifetime of.
Why don’t we do this more often? Come together, my friends and their sisters and mothers and I, alter our waistlines, laugh theatrically. I want to scoop them out of the arms of their husbands and take them back to being 22 with me, condemn them to more wondering and wandering and a now regrettable style of eyebrows.
In the airport you ask me do you want to be a wife? A bride? I think in terms of theory from gray-paged books rather than the practical matter of my insomnia without you. I don’t answer, instead tell you about a book I’m reading, what that protagonist wants to do. To be the protagonist is not just a matter of fact but of virtue. To be a protagonist is to have desires that fuel plot. To be a bride is to be the protagonist for a night, to wield goodness irrefutably, advance the plot undeniably. In the old novels, this would be the end. In the air above my friends, the wives, I wonder “now what?”
Love is this, but also that ❤️ beautiful!
I <3 this xx